Spring Ephemeral Series #3

Here’s another one of the spring ephemerals:

White Baneberry

White baneberry is a larger individual plant than most of the spring ephemerals, but there’s only a couple of them in the woods. This species is also called doll’s eye because the poisonous berries look like doll eyes.

Baneberry with flower buds coming along

It was absent from the main ephemeral display last year because the spring brought a variety of inclement weather, including a warm period followed by some hard freezes and that seemed to get the better of this plant. Fortunately, after checking on it later, I saw that the plants had berries coming along on them, so they must have bloomed at some point (there are no paths to that spot, so I don’t get back there super often… and it seems even more inaccessible lately since some big branches have come down). There was one year, though, where I managed to get some cool pictures of it with wild geraniums coloring the background… which turned out to be a surprisingly awkward angle to try to get. (Shooting from a standing position was too high an angle, and from crouching was too low…)

Snow on the Mountains

On the day we left New Mexico it had snowed overnight, and the mountains were cloaked in clouds when we got up. As the morning went on, the clouds started to dissipate. I went outside for a bit to stretch my legs before getting on the road for most of the day, and decided to point my telephoto lens at the snow covered mountain, and wound up getting what turned out to be some of my favorite photos from the trip. There are bits of cloud still caught up in the mountain in these and snow dusted trees.

Crop from the first photo
Crop from the third photo
Crop from the sixth photo